


A Quantum of Mercy

by 19thjester



Category: Quantum Leap, Twilight Zone
Genre: Gen, Time Travel, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-24
Updated: 2017-11-24
Packaged: 2019-02-06 09:36:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12814728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/19thjester/pseuds/19thjester
Summary: In 1961, a young naval officer briefly leaps through time into an Army lieutenant in 1945, then both leap into a Japanese lieutenant in 1942.





	1. May 7, 1961

**Author's Note:**

> Rated T for language. Episodes you should at least be familiar with for this fic: Quantum Leap's Future Boy, and Twilight Zone's A Quality of Mercy. The same actor is in both, so I thought it'd be interesting to combine both series, somehow.

“Heya, Bingo, Digger thinks you should come with me, check out this crazy thing!”

Lieutenant (j.g.) Albert Calavicci, better known as Bingo to his Navy pals, squinted one eye up at his best friend, who was hanging over the gate. He had been working on scoping out the scenery of his backyard, trying to wiggle out of Beth’s ordered chores, while burning up a pack. But if this was interesting enough… “What thing?”

“Digger’s brother-in-law works for this guy, Moe…” Chip gestured in the air with his cigar like he was trying to rope in the memory. “…Moe something. They worked on something they’re calling a ‘time machine.’ Now they’re looking for a volunteer.”

Bingo laughed as he pulled out a cigarette from his latest pack of Chesterfields. “You’re pullin’ my leg, Chip.” He lit it up and took a drag. Exhaling, he said, “Do they really think they can time travel? That’s some science fiction nonsense-“

“Digger said they think they can. They want to find someone who wants to go back in time. What a scream!” Chip threw back his head in a laugh.

Bingo squinted at his flight buddy through a fog of smoke. Thoughts he’d been repressing for the last eight years were now threatening to come to the surface. He jumped up and pulled the cigarette out of his mouth. “Yeah, let’s go! It’ll be a scream!” After scribbling a quick note for Beth, he left it on the patio table, then he slammed the gate behind him as he hopped off into Chip’s car. She was out that afternoon, so hopefully she wouldn’t be too upset.

As they left for Moe’s house, those repressed thoughts finally surfaced. He’d told almost nobody about Trudy. At Annapolis, there’d been the one doctor who inquired about family history, and there was Beth, last spring. Whenever people asked him about his family, Bingo would shrug and say, “They’re all gone.” He usually got claps of sympathy on his back and invitations to others’ family events from that, so it wasn’t all bad. The guys didn’t need to know the details, anyway. If Bingo could go back in time to 1953, he’d pretend to be a doctor and help Trudy not die. Then he’d transfer her to a better home in Maryland, where she could live while he finished his education at Annapolis. Of course, he wouldn’t be going away to Annapolis until the following year, but it was still good to plan ahead.

They arrived at a non-descript brick house. A few gadgets littered the front yard. Bingo leaned over to get a good look at one, then Chip yanked him back by the collar. “What are you doing?”

“The guy who lives here, did he make this or what?”

“I guess, but I wouldn’t touch that with a ten-foot pole if I were you. Digger said he’s here with the wifey, visiting the brother-in-law. Come on!”

They rang the doorbell, and an older man, in his sixties, answered. “Oh, are you Peter’s friends? Please, please, come in!”

Digger was inside, sitting on the couch with his wife. He raised a hand in greeting to Chip and Bingo. “Hey you two. Here to see the fabled time machine?”

“Yup,” Chip said.

Digger’s wife asked, “Oh, hey, Al. How’s Beth doing?”

“Fine, fine, she’s fine.” Bingo smiled. “So what’s all this about a time machine?”

Digger said, “Moe’s been working on a time machine for years. His assistant’s been working with him on it for the past three or four years, since he came up with some new ideas.”

“You know how it works?” The Naval pilots shook their heads, and the old man, Moe, continued, while taking a piece of string out of his own pocket. “This end of the string is when you were born, and the other end is when you die. You tie this string up in a loop, then you crumple it up like this. Then, see, you can jump around within your own lifetime! That’s how this machine works- it crumples up the string of your lifetime.” Moe clapped. “Kenny’s downstairs, making a few final tweaks.”

Digger got up. “C’mon. I’ll give you guys the tour.” He led his fellow pilots past a framed photograph of Einstein, through the house and down the basement stairs.

In the middle of the unfinished basement, there was a huge cylinder going from floor to ceiling. Digger gestured around the basement, talking about the various features. Apparently, Moe had used a different design until Kenny stepped in a few years before. The cylinder was supposed to focus the neurons and mesons, whatever the hell those were, so that the person within could more easily jump backwards or forwards in time.

“How’d he come up with the cylinder?” Bingo asked, circling the controls for the mysterious “time machine.”

Digger shrugged, and that was when Kenny came out of the cylinder, its door whooshing open. “It just came to me,” he said. “One day, about three years ago, I was down here, looking at the machine with Moe. Then some part of my brain says, out of nowhere, ‘no, no, this doesn’t look right.’ I changed it and I think it works a lot better. We just got a new generator that’s way more powerful, so Moe swears this attempt will work.”

Bingo elbowed Chip in the side. “You should go!”

“Me? No way! You should go!” Chip elbowed him back.

“Boys, boys, no fighting,” Moe chided as he came down the stairs. “Al, was it? You can go first.”

Bingo shrugged widely, then he flashed a grin over his shoulder at Chip as he followed Kenny into the cylinder. The door whooshed shut behind them.

There was a chair in the middle of the room, bristling with hardware. Bingo sat down in the chair, and Kenny belted him in with various restraints at legs, crotch and shoulders. Then Kenny put a helmet with attached goggles on Bingo’s head and secured it. “Not that different from a fighter jet,” Bingo laughed.

Kenny wasn’t laughing. “Do you have a specific time and date you want to go to? A place?”

“Try noon on February first, 1953. Brooklyn State Hospital, New York City, New York.”

There was a clock attached to a perpetual calendar that was bolted to a shelf. Kenny fiddled with it, setting the date to Bingo’s specifications. Then he consulted an atlas. “Where is this… Brooklyn State Hospital? I need coordinates.”

“Can you find Prospect Park? That should be close enough.”

Kenny paused to give him a good, long look. “You’re looking for something, aren’t you?”

Bingo looked away.

“I understand. Moe was going through the same thing for a while. That’s why he got started on this machine to begin with. Can I ask what’s there, or…?”

Bingo shook his head, his thick eyebrows so far down they nearly hid his eyes. “It means something to me and doesn’t mean anything to you.”

Kenny went back to looking through the atlas. He made some measurements with a ruler, then wrote some numbers down. Then he turned the dials on a device next to the calendar/clock combination, entering the coordinates.

"This won’t kill me, right?” Bingo blurted out.

“No. We’ve made sure whatever electricity comes out is at a non-lethal level. At most, you’ll feel some mild tingling. Are you ready?”

“Aye-aye.”

Kenny double-checked the date and the coordinates before leaving. After he left, a second door came out, sealing the cylindrical room.

 _This is stupid,_ Bingo thought. _I’m going to get a little zap, Chip and Digger will get a good laugh, and we can fly as usual on Monday, I can get my usual blast of adrenaline-_

Despite the darkened vision from the helmet goggles, the blue-white light filling the room was blinding. Bingo squeezed his eyes shut against it. When he opened his eyes, he expected to see the clean white halls of a psychiatric ward.


	2. August 6, 1945/1942

Instead, Bingo found himself in the middle of a humid jungle. Various army tents were scattered around him, and people in dark green uniforms were running around.

“Shit on a shingle,” Bingo whispered. Talk about his luck! A Navy pilot winding up in the middle of the Army! Wait, the Navy…? Why would he be in the Navy? Wasn’t he an Army lieutenant?

“Katell!” someone was shouting. “We need you!”

Katell. That had to be him, right? Who was Bingo, anyway? Katell turned around. It was the captain in charge of the camp. “The Japs got this group’s officer, so you need to go in and take over. Get into your battle gear and go. Remember, we need to defeat them! Do whatever it takes! Be more careful than Lieutenant Ridgway, understood?”

“Yes sir!” Katell saluted his captain. He quickly found his tent so he could change. His issued helmet was a little too big for him, but that couldn’t be helped with a war on and low supply. No matter. He knew how to adjust to the helmet’s quirks, and right now, he had a mission to get to.

A soldier in a jeep drove up, and Katell jumped inside.

The jeep wound its way through the jungle, and the driver talked. “You know, this group, they’ve had it rough,” he said. “They’re worn-out, and they need all the motivation they could get. We’ve got to keep fighting! That’s your job, Katell- get them to keep fighting.”

They arrived, and Katell got out. He marched over to the group of soldiers, the troop that he was in charge of, and asked what was going on.

There was a cave, they said, with a group of Japanese soldiers holed up inside. That was the enemy who had taken out their previous officer, the enemy who needed to be defeated no matter what.

(A part of Katell, the part that belonged sixteen years into the future, was protesting. Shouldn’t they be more careful, assess the situation more?)

Katell asked to see. (Bingo, finally gathering up the nerve to assert himself within this body, grabbed the binoculars. Forgetting to account for the slightly-too-big helmet, his binoculars clanked against the brim before he pushed it back up.) Yes, there were Japs in that cave. There was only one thing to do. Katell advised the troop to go in and attack.

The sergeant didn’t agree, so Katell reminded him who was leading whom, pointing out that he was the one who wore metal, not the sergeant. It was important to attack the enemy, no matter what. If more Japs than Americans died, then that was good. Katell swiped mud on his face in preparation for the attack.

As the soldiers prepared to depart, Katell’s binoculars fell. There was a brief flash of blue-white light.

Someone else picked up the binoculars. Katell/Bingo flinched when he saw it was a Japanese soldier who was handing the binoculars back to him. What was he doing here, among the enemy?! Maybe he could retreat to that cave… But no, there was an American here. His own people. What on earth was going on here?

As Katell retreated, he was given orders. Bingo heard the orders in Japanese, but Katell heard them in broken English. He must go in, attack the Americans! The enemy must be defeated, no matter what!

Katell, who was being called Yamuri by his present company, tried to argue with them. Meanwhile, Bingo was working out the situation. So he had ended up in the body of a Lt. Katell. Then somehow, both of them had ended up in the body of this Japanese soldier, Lt. Yamuri. Why? Why had he ended up somewhere in the Second World War’s Pacific and not in 1953 Brooklyn?

Bingo briefly considered escaping. Even if he made it all the way to New York as Yamuri, he’d be too much of an outsider to do anything. If he went back into Katell, that’d be easier. Only one problem with that plan, though. It was August 1945… or was it August 1942, like he was hearing some of the Japanese soldiers say via Katell’s perceptions? By August 1945, Bingo’s father was either very ill or already dead- that part of his life was a blur in his memory. There was no hope, either way.

Bingo was a military man in a military situation, so he assessed that instead. Katell was still arguing with his superior officer, who was now thinking Yamuri was either sick or had lost his nerve. He wanted to tell Katell to give in, just go along with it, and hope things turned out for the best. But it was too late. Yamuri was relieved of his command and the group went forward.

There was another brief flash of blue light, and now the soldiers around him were American, not Japanese. They said that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Japan, and now the war was over. The enemy had finally been defeated.

Bingo sat there in shock. That was it? At least they didn’t have to worry about attacking the cave… but what if the Japanese soldiers there had meant as well as their 1942 American counterparts? What if they’d been able to pass them by? What if a wartime death could’ve been prevented? How many wartime deaths could be prevented? How much, in time, could someone prevent?

There was celebration, but Bingo felt too numb to join in. He closed his eyes, and there was another flash of blue-white light.

He opened his eyes, and he was back in the cylindrical room. What… what had just happened?

Bingo’s hands went to his face, feeling it all over. Clean. No mud there. He looked down at himself. No Army uniform. There was just the Hawaiian shirt and khakis that counted for his civvies today. The pack of Chesterfields was still in his pocket. The restraining belts were still in place. No slightly-loose WWII helmet was on his head- just the time machine’s helmet. The room was slightly darkened by the goggles.

A few minutes passed. Then the secondary door withdrew, the door to the rest of the basement whooshed open and Kenny came in. “Did anything happen?”

Bingo had been considering what to say. If he said yes, it worked, then they would try again with other people, who would be as lost as he was in 1945 and 1942. These people needed someone to help them out, keep them centered so they didn’t lose themselves in the person they ended up in, and tell them what the fuck was going on. There was no way to do that, as far as Bingo knew, so this machine was too dangerous.

Bingo shook his head, laughing. “No, just a little tingle. I guess this thing’s a dud, huh?”

Kenny frowned. “The readings said you disappeared for one second.”

“Probably faulty readings. It happens. I’ve heard other pilots talk about it happening in their aircraft too.” Usually in the Bermuda Triangle, but Bingo wasn’t about to tell Kenny that. He waited for Kenny to undo his belts, then he stood up and stretched. “Maybe you should give up on this. What’s the point of a time machine, anyway?”

Kenny laughed along with him. “Yeah, you’re right, there’s no point to it.”


	3. After May 7, 1961

Bingo told Chip and Digger that the time machine was a dud and that Moe should just give up on the silly thing, and they all had a good laugh about Bingo’s little zap. But the whole experience would continue to haunt him for the rest of his life.

While flying missions in Vietnam, the old World War Two mentality of “destroy the enemy” came back to haunt him. Bingo combated it by adding a huge heap of caution. He was doing pretty well that way until 1967, but shit happens. While hunched over in a tiger cage, Bingo’s memories of his time travels floated up, encouraged by the long days and nights of discomfort. After coming home and finding out that his best friend had died overseas, Bingo took the Katell memories and locked them up tightly in a mental safe, along with most of his prisoner-of-war memories.

Bingo, better known as Al after coming home, was welcomed back as a war hero and went up quite a few ranks. He was also given the privilege to become an astronaut for NASA, which included attending conferences for research purposes. One day, while attending a physics conference, Al saw a young man in his mid-twenties enthusiastically telling anyone he could about his huge idea. Most people were rolling their eyes at him, but Al hung around to listen.

This young man wanted to build a time machine. He was saying, “Look, this shoelace is your lifetime.” Here, he took out his own shoelace to help him demonstrate. “One end is your birth, the other is your death. You tie this up in a loop, see? Then you crumple it up like this. Then you jump around.” The young man’s long fingers jumped from place to place on the crumpled-up string in his palm to demonstrate, but most of his audience wasn’t interested.

Al spoke up. “Have you thought about what will happen after you go into time?”

The young man blinked at him, green eyes wide. “I… want to observe the past, maybe change things.”

“How are you going to do that? Do you think you’ll remember everything when you get there?”

“Sure, I guess.”

Al squinted at him, raising his eyebrows. “You haven’t thought this all the way through, have you, kid?”

“I’ve been working on it. That was part of my thesis for my doctorate in physics- how to time travel.” The kid was standing as tall as he could now, and his voice was hot, defensive.

“Kid, it’s one thing to travel in time. It’s another to figure out what you’re doing when you get there.” Al smiled at him. This kid was onto something, whether he realized it or not. For the first time in sixteen years, the memory of Moe’s time machine resurfaced. “Let’s sit down and discuss this idea of yours in-depth, okay? I’ve got some ideas for you. By the way, my name’s Captain Albert Calavicci.” He stuck out his hand.

“My name’s Dr. Sam Beckett. Nice to meet you.” Sam shook Al’s hand. Then he frowned. “Wait a minute, Al Calavicci the astronaut?”

“And the war hero,” Al added automatically, rolling his eyes. “But I think you have something great on your hands, Sam. You need a little more work on this idea, and you need my help convincing the government that they can fund this one day. Come on, let’s blow this pop stand, huh? Lunch’s on me. You look hungry.”

Al had thought about the 1945/1942 problem on and off for years, especially in Vietnam, and he reluctantly coaxed those thoughts back out during that first conversation with Sam in a nearby diner. Al wasn’t sure why time travel scrambled your brains, but he thought it had something to do with occupying another person’s body. During that long, long first conversation, the men discussed hypothetical time travel situations, and what they would do in certain situations. Al advocated for an outside person, someone who could help out the time traveler with their confusion in case they didn’t go to the targeted time, and Sam agreed.

Holography was a new invention at the time, so they agreed to work on it, develop it further so that it could be used in conjunction with time travel. That led to Al working on Project Starbright, and bringing Sam on board for that project. All the connections and knowledge they gained there proved invaluable when Sam and Al launched their joint project in 1990: Project Quantum Leap.

Many years later, long after Sam had come home and the project had been divided up then shuttered, the two former project directors were sitting on Al’s back porch in Alamogordo, New Mexico, having a few beers and talking.

“I ever tell you I time traveled?” Al said, staring at the setting sun.

“Sure, to 1945. I remember- you blew it! And didn’t I have to bail you out?” Sam laughed.

Al blinked rapidly, then he frowned. He waved that away. “No… Now that you mention it, it’s funny that I time traveled to that year twice!” He laughed at that and took a swallow of his beer. “No, this was a long time before I met you…” Al then told Sam the story of how a young Navy officer happened to sit down in a homemade time machine in 1961 and disappear into 1945, then into 1942, for what seemed like a single second before coming back.

After Al finished, Sam asked, “So you didn’t recognize Moe Stein at first?”

“Took me a while, but I couldn’t believe it!” Al grinned. “It’d been, what, thirty-five years? And I didn’t expect to see him again!”

Sam sat quietly, sipping at his beer. “You know, Al, it’s strange. You said that you had to fight for control in Katell. I don’t remember feeling like that in most of my leapees.”

“Yeah, that was something I thought about a lot while you were away on leaps. I think I came to the conclusion that since Moe’s machine didn’t have as much juice as yours did- and oh boy, did we use some serious juice at the Project- not as much of me leaped in. Does that make any sense?”

Sam frowned. “Like… less of your neurons and mesons were leaped through time because there wasn’t as much power?”

Al made a looping gesture with one hand. “Something like that.”

Sam looked up at the darkening twilight sky and grinned. “That’s how you knew, back in 1977. Because you’d already been there. What haven’t you done, Al?”

“Oh, plenty of things. I’d like to travel a little, but I’m waiting for some investments to pay off first.” Al stretched out in his chair.

“You know what?” Sam smiled his big dopey smile at Al. “I think God, fate, time or whatever wanted you to time travel in 1961.”

Al squinted one eye at him. “What for?”

“So that I’d have help, a good friend who knows what I’ve been through and wanted to make sure I wasn’t lost.”

“That’s the cheesiest thing I’ve ever heard you say, Sam, and I’ve heard you say plenty of cheesy things,” Al said, but he couldn’t resist a smile.


End file.
